Rodriguez shoot sends extra to hospital

The actress has been shooting Tropico de sangre, in which she also stars, in the Dominican Republic - and reveals the project was recently hit by a near-tragedy.

Rodriguez reveals she plucked one of the set caterers from obscurity and gave him a small role in her film - and his brush with stardom almost killed him.

She explains, "There are a lot of liabilities that come with the production... You're working in a country where they don't really have a film industry... so safety precautions like, 'Don't put real bullets into a pistol before you load and shoot a scene,' doesn't mean 'shoot (the) guy with a real bullet.'

"Thank God he's OK... He's a good sport; he came to the set a couple of weeks later. He's really cool... He actually works in our kitchen; he wanted to be in the movie and it was a quick scene, where he would have to play a chauffeur."

Rodriguez insists the incident would not have happened if she had been on set the day of the scene: "It's between the military guys and the special effects guys, and I guess, in some way, they communicated and a (real) bullet was loaded into the gun."